The Four Hundred Dollars at Our Kitchen Table

After supper I went upstairs and stripped our bed. I put the flannel sheets on, the good ones, and I put the foam topper back on that I had taken off years ago when Jon said it made him too hot. Our bed is tall. A new hip likes a tall bed.

I carried my pillows and my alarm clock downstairs. I moved the commode chair up to the bathroom next to our room, and I put the raised seat on the toilet the way the therapist had shown me.

Then I went down and got my mother.

“I can’t do those stairs, Erin,” she said.

“You can. Rhonda at therapy said you could do them last Tuesday. Up with the good, down with the bad. I’ll be right behind you.”

We did it together, one step at a time, the good leg up first, her hand on the rail and my hand flat on her back. Six steps. It took us almost ten minutes, and she was breathing hard at the top.

At the top she held onto my sleeve, and she said, “You were always my good girl.” She had not said that to me since I was about nine years old. I had to stand there a second in the upstairs hall before I could help her the rest of the way.

I got her into bed and tucked the sheets the way she used to tuck mine. She was asleep before I turned out the lamp. I think it was the first real night of sleep she had had in four weeks.

Then I went down and made up the couch for myself, with the same pillow and the same folded quilt, and I lay there in the dark living room with the light from the stove clock and I thought about what I was going to say.

I did not sleep much. That couch really is too low for anybody. I was on it most of a month in the end, and I have the back to prove it.

In the morning I got up before anybody, made a full pot of coffee, and set out two cups at the kitchen table. It was Saturday. Outside the window the yard was blue-white and the bird feeder was crowded with chickadees.

Marjorie came out at a quarter to eight like she always did, already dressed, already in a sweater. She saw the two cups and she saw me sitting there, and she knew.

She poured her coffee and sat across from me. She took her time with the creamer.

“Mom won’t be paying you anymore,” I said.

Marjorie stirred. “She offered.”

“No, she didn’t. You told her what it came to, and you told her not to tell me.”

Marjorie set her spoon down on a napkin, very neatly. “It costs money to run a house, Erin. You of all people know that. One more person is more groceries, more heat, more water. I thought it was only right that she contribute.”

“You’re right about one thing,” I said. “It does cost money to run a house.”

She looked at me, a little surprised. I think she had expected me to cry, or yell, and I want you to know I did neither. I had decided in the night that I would not raise my voice in my own kitchen, not to my husband’s mother, not ever.